


When You're In Your Little Room

by test_kard_girl



Category: X-Men (Movies), X-Men (Movieverse), X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Cherik - Freeform, M/M, Mutant Husbands, chronology what chronology, stupid mutant husbands
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-02
Updated: 2016-02-02
Packaged: 2018-05-17 20:38:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5884381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/test_kard_girl/pseuds/test_kard_girl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>These two are the living embodiment of angst. I'm sorry. It's just too easy to write tortured internal monologues for Erik Lehnsherr (and Charles  actually... i'll have to post them later). Takes place in some random hotel room in between the gang leaving Washington and arriving in Paris in <i>Days Of Future Past</i>. Don't look too closely at the chronology.</p><p>Title is from the White Stripes song of the same name. Aaaaand now I want a Charles/Erik White Stripes AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When You're In Your Little Room

Erik catches the briefest smear of ugly, psychedelic wallpaper in the grimy mirror and quickly turns away before he can meet his own eyes. He's woken up in hotel rooms before, with Charles. Although... they used to be better than this. Erik doesn't know if this says more about Charles' fast-frittering fortune or the decade-older world he's unceremoniously been spat out into. But whichever it is, he can't avoid the harsh, hollow echoes of the last morning they had together. The neglected cornices and dark, scarred mahogany of Charles' bedroom. Twenty years' worth of photographs staining the wallpaper and the air thick with dust motes and bitterness and neither of them wanting to be the first to move because they would start a war that day.

He wanders around the end of the bed and picks up his watch from the bedside table. Fixes the catch closed with a satisfying snap around his wrist.

"So. Is there a plan?"

Charles makes one of those incredulous noises that seem to have replaced all the pretty words he once knew. He pulls his t-shirt on over his head; rustles his hands through his wilfully irreparable hair.

"A plan?" He lets out a cracked laugh. "We find Raven."

"Do you know where she is?"

"I know where she _will_ be." He flicks an amused finger between the two of them: " _We_  know. The future us. In the future...God, I'm not gonna get used to this..."

Erik finds the concept of time travel less difficult to swallow than the idea that both of them survive long enough to outlive their mutual emnity and slip neatly back into being something like on the same side. But he doesn't say this out loud. Last night everything was too new: all at once and bleeding like ink stains around the edges. But Erik wants to ask that man--Logan-- what becomes of them; how many years it's been. How many wars. How many wounds. How alone they are.

_...You decided to stay._

Erik lets go of a tattered breath, the old, old words flickering between his synapses.

"Can you pass me that?" He asks, reaching out his fingers, and glances up to find Charles already close, leaning against the sideboard and offering Erik his own half-finished tea. Erik takes it. Their fingers brush: "And I thought you weren't a telepath anymore."

Charles' gaze skates downwards, examining the carpet.

If forced, Erik might not even be able to explain why that single fact scrapes furrows down his spine. But it does. Thinking about his old friend's grasping, desperate acceptance of normalacy makes his stomach turn and his teeth grit; the only thing that ever brought them together and Charles gave it up in a heartbeat. He can't explain it: how some night (days, nights, they were all the same) the only thing that kept him marginally sane was the whisper of Charles' thoughts wrapped up with his own.

Erik sips his tea, wrapping his hands around the warmth. Charles looks nothing like he used to, and it's taken Erik all night to find the words, but it's the _hope_  that's gone out of him. Left shadows in his cheeks and stolen the sparkle out of his eyes. He used to carry off 'artfully dishevelled' in the way only riotous English academics seem to be able to. But now he just looks _wrecked_ : too thin, veins swollen in his left arm where he injects that bastard serum into himself... Everything about him is blunt-edged and beaten and Erik realises with a sinking in his gut that he has become so much that he despises. Realises that if he didn't know him, if part of him didn't still crave him like the best kind of revenge, he would kill him; and it would be valid and easy and he would think nothing of it.

They seem to favour ugly, ill looking colours now, here, in 1973, and Erik thinks the hope has gone out of the world too. The brash optimism of post-war America might have hurt his eyes after so long wandering a Europe with the shit kicked out of it. But this bright future is a country in the grip of a vicious hangover and Erik thinks he'll tire of it very quickly.

"...Have you accomplished anything in the last ten years?" He exhales over the rim of his mug-- angrier than he has any right to be, probably-- just as Charles lowers himself carefully down to sit beside him and at once looks like he wouldn't mind punching him in the face again. Erik watches the other man pull a tight breath in through his nose, fingertips white against ceramic. (Maybe this is all they can do now: fight and snap and fuck and wound. He doesn't know what he expected.)

Charles' too-familiar fingers pick at the knee of his jeans: "...I'm still here aren't I?" He returns at last, and Erik is honestly unable to understand if it's desperation or disappointment or something more like that haunting sadness Erik felt as every fixture of his blank white prison cell remained resolutely unmoved while he tried for ten years to remind himself he was something extraordinary.

They look at each other. In spite of everything, it is still harder to look away than to watch, searching and needy, for some spark of recognition.

Then, Charles fixes his hand in Erik's collar and drags his mouth back to his, kissing him again, hard, like he's aware it's a little bit of a punishment, and Erik drops his tea onto the horrific carpet and bites down on Charles' lip and kisses him back.

He wishes it mattered more than it does.


End file.
